Happy Responsive New Year

Added on: Saturday 18th January 2014

During 2013 mobile and tablet usage continued to grow at a phenomenal rate so that between them they now account for 25% of all internet usage. I think this can no longer be ignored by website developers.

One of my resolutions for 2014 is to make sure that any new websites or applications I build are responsive.

I will convert some existing applications but there is an additional cost involved with this that might not be able to be absorbed.

Although designing and building responsive websites is more expensive than creating a traditional desktop website, it is worth the time and effort involved.

I don't use my phone that much for web browsing but when I do I get frustrated with the amount of zooming and panning I need to do.

Responsive design involves a completely different design process because there may be options you don't have on a mobile - hover for example - or there are some things that are more difficult to do - selecting options for example.

So you really need to have different content displayed for different devices - for example on a phone you don't really need to download a huge banner image.

I think a responsive design calls for a framework to help with some of these elements of the build process and Zurb Foundation or Twitter Bootstrap are two that are now extremely well developed.

I favour Foundation at the moment and am using this wherever a new project requires it.

As a way of getting familiar with the functionality of Foundation this site is now responsive so have a look on a mobile or tablet and see what you think.

Permalink